Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2008-10-09 18:26
Ed Palanker wrote,
>>I know many won't agree with me but when I teach a piece like that I do suggest the student listen to a few different recordings and take what they like from each. I also show them what I like to do and suggest they try some of my suggestions as well. But in the final interpretation I ask them to put something of themselves into the performance. Never simply be a copy of someone else.>>
Although it makes sense to encourage students to listen to a variety of performances, instead of fixating on just one and slavishly copying it, "take what they like from each" sounds risky -- sounds like a method that could lead to a disorganized jumble of bits and pieces. The great compositions and the great performances have a powerful momentum: the composer and then the interpreter each have a strong sense of where the music is going and why. Every note sounds inevitable. The listener doesn't stop to think, "Wait a minute. Did the composer write a rest there? Does that note have a fermata?" The mere fact that we're questioning whether these interpretations work means they don't work. If they worked, it wouldn't occur to us to question them.
That sense of drive, momentum, is why, for instance, a performance of Bach's "The Art of Fugue" sounds so devastating when the performer doesn't try to interpret (guess) what Bach might have meant to do next, but instead plays precisely what Bach wrote and no more, and thus ends the performance abruptly, jarringly, at the point where Bach died before he finished writing. That sense of "line" is so strong in Bach that interrupting it, breaking it off in the middle, feels like an electric shock--and serves to make the point that what precedes *does* have this power of momentum.
I'm an amateur, but FWIW (having taken piano from a teacher who asked me never to listen to a recording until I'd worked all the way through a piece by myself) I think the best place for a student to learn the momentum of any given piece is not in other people's performances, but in close analysis of what the composer wrote. It seems that most pieces, including Copeland (in large part because of Goodman), gather a collection of interpretative encrustations like the barnacles on the bottom of the hull. The weight of them can sink the boat if they're not cleared off now and then -- as the weight of past performances can confuse or even discourage a student.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
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